Cloud services that facilitate email, document management, multimedia file management, and the like have become increasingly available to any user that has access to an Internet connection. The growth of easily accessible and affordable cloud storage has encouraged a shift in user behavior away from a general reliance on storing data on a user's local, personal storage device to a greater reliance on storing data utilizing one or more readily available cloud storage services. Such cloud services promise a user anywhere access, regardless of user device, which encourages users to store vast quantities of information in cloud storage repositories. However, as the user's library of digital content items grows, a single particular content item may become increasingly more difficult to locate without appropriate information discovery, search, and retrieval processes.
The benefits of cloud storage have also made it increasingly easy to share documents amongst a group of users. This aspect of user groups adds to the complexity of search and retrieval techniques in cloud based systems.
Though the challenges identified above are described with respect to cloud based document storage, it is noted that the same or similar challenges may exist in other computer networks. For instance, the same or similar challenges may exist in any network of computer devices that facilitates sharing of emails, documents, notes, or any other type of data between particular groups of users.